The Chronicles of Goshen (a series)

THE GARDENS OF GOSHEN (Volume 3)The Stuff of Boys (Chapter 1 of 4)
1 - A Big StickWalk softly and carry a big stick. This sounds like something a boy would do. This sounds like something a man would say. This saying is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United Sticks. President Roosevelt was a boy's man, and a man's boy, and ever the twain shall meet. This is my subject today, the stuff of boys, and Teddy had the stuff.He believed in the strenuous life, and in a
long career that included political office and military service and foreign
expeditions, he found time to hike and hunt and row boats and ride horses and
box for exercise and bathe in frigid rivers.Teddy
was mostly a man when he did those things; I was mostly a boy. Nobody was
teaching me these things; I just did them; they were things all boys did
then.And if we wanted to improve our
skills and refine our techniques and increase our knowledge, we had the books
back then.Like The
Dangerous Book for Boys, by the brothers Iggulden, Conn and Hal.The book was published just this year, so the
chance that I read it as a boy is less than slim.But it is exactly the sort of book I would
have read as a boy, and I did.When I
was a boy boy, that is to say, a boy who measured his years by a single
digit̶which, by the way, I still have̶I had never heard of the Boy Scouts, or
Baden-Powell, or the book Scouting for Boys.But I did have a library card, and I had
unlimited access to boy books which narrated the antics of Winnie the Pooh, and
adventures in the Green Forest and Green Meadows and the dear old Briar Patch,
and the escapades of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Bear.So I
was well aware that nature was the hangout of interesting fauna, and that
dangers lurked in every thicket, and that for survival in the wild, it was
essential to hone one’s cunning.And I had an aunt in New England who sent me boxesful
of Daffy Duck comic books and Dick Tracey booklets and every year, a tattered
copy of The Boys Own Annual, which took a whole year to read.So I
was well aware that some aquatic avian biota were sapient creatures with
inexplicably bizarre behaviour, and that a real man could sustain the impact
and perforations of a hail of bullets, and that when I grew older, I would be
enlisted to fight Zulus and capture slave traders and expose blackguards, often
white ones.I have
carried these lessons into manhood, with minor adjustments, for I know still
that animals have dignity and feelings, and that a man must endure many a
hardship in the pursuit of duty, and that the enemy has many faces, and when we
meet him, he is too often us.You
will note that the literature which influenced my boyhood was not Canadian
literature; it was British and American literature.And you will note that the literature and the
entertainment culture which most influence the boy boys of Canada today are
still British and American, as evidenced by the popularity of TheLord
of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and Shrek.It’s a Canadian quirk, eh?The
Dangerous Book for Boys is a British book.The authors Iggulden open with the statement, “In this age of video
games and mobile phones, there must still be a place for knots, tree-houses and
stories of incredible courage.”They
move on to assert, “Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and
interested in the same things.”The
men-boys Iggulden claim that their book is the sort of book they would have
liked to have read when they were boy boys.So they wrote it.Some of
the stuff in this book is so British that you have read it with an accent.The game of conkers, for instance.There are explicit instructions for making a
conker, using a shoelace and a horse chestnut.“The first thing to do is spend an autumn afternoon throwing sticks into
the branches of horse chestnut trees.”There is a detailed description of the selection and preparation of
laces and nuts, and one ends up with a nut on the end of a string, sort of like
Dick Cheney on a leash, only less lethal.In the game itself, with other boys, one tries to strike and demolish
the nut – just one – of the opponent.There are elaborate rules.There
are tricks to employ, and secret recipes for producing a masterful conker.Cunning is important, but sportsmanship is
paramount.The
instructions end, “Now go out and find a big stick.”How
American is that?[Continued in Chapters 2, 3, & 4]

THE JARHEADS OF GOSHEN (Volume 2)

Nebuchita Mosquita

You never really miss it till it’s gone. So often we hear this said about the things we take for granted. Things such as relationships. Such as gas at 89 cents a litre. And icebergs.

Newfoundland, now, is missing its icebergs. This is the time of year when the icebergs from Greenland should be migrating past the rockbound shores, and herds of teary-eyed codfish chasers are wishing them bon voyage.

But the bergs have just melted away. This time, the usual suspect, the GulfStream, is not to blame. Something more sinister is afloat. Pirates,perhaps. Or global warming. Or it may be opportunistic bar stewardson the love boats that ply between Florida and Baffin Island.

Newfoundlanders have always missed a lot of things. Often these are things they never had. Take their coat of arms, for example. Much revered. As a coat. If it had no arms, then it would a vest. And quite unsuited to the climate on The Rock for twelve-and-a-half months of theyear.

The Newfoundland coat of arms has an elk on it. Now, Newfoundland has never had elk. Rotarians, yeah, several knights of columbus, and an oddfellow or two, but no elk. And so they miss that elk.

Now that it’s July, the busy season for iceberg watchers, the TouristBureau claims that they are inundated with inquiries about Iceberg Alley, and when people learn that the bergs are missing this year, they are cancelling reservations left and right. So that makes two come-from-aways who will not be returning to The Rock this year.

And the coat of arms has depicted on it “a savage of the area”, alsoknown as a Beothuk, of whom, when Newfoundland did have Beothuk(1),there had never been any confirmed sightings, so they never really missed them, and that explains why they put one on their coat of arms in the year 1658, and have been missing him ever since.

Hey, I wish I were making this up, but I’m not that clever. This is as true as anything you will ever hear in Newfoundland.

Which brings me to the subject of community mascots.

A mascot, to qualify, must be alive, or dead, and must signify somethingabout the community. Popular mascots are bears and geese and moose, which, if ever found alive, or dead, inside a community, are either shunned, or shooed, or shot. Then everyone misses them. So, that signifies something, I guess.

Some mascots have human connections, being canucks or oilers or senators(though this last named may not qualify – as a hockey team, I mean). Other mascots are really bizarre, even to a person of my sensibilities, such as gophers, and rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes.

In the land o’ Goshen, Nebuchad has a mosquito mascot, NebuchitaMosquita. Mosquitoes are apparently a major tourist attraction. I do wish I were making this up so you could call me a liar. But residents are really apprehensive about this tourist season because so many mosquitoes are missing. If you expose a patch of skin for five seconds, you can expect forty-five, fifty bites, tops, as opposed to normally ten times that number. This may explain why four to five tourists have not returned.

This has happened before. And during those times of crisis, there has been grave talk about banning clothes, and forest fires, and indoor sex, all of which things tend to deter mosquitoes.

You may have thought that the codfish was the mascot of Newfoundland, but it is, as I said, the missing elk. Still, there are many confirmed cod sightings each year. As soon as one is sighted, there is a general rush to the scene, and the cod is promptly consumed, liver and oil. Some of the more bizarre sightings claim that the codfish are wearing sequined costumes, strumming guitars, and singing “Heartbreak Hotel”. But, other informants say, when they have sobered up, that the cod are really elves. Jolly little elves, singing “Heartbreak Hotel”.

By the way, also on the Newfoundland coat of arms, are an African lion and a unicorn. The lion, I can safely say, has never been sighted, dead or alive, for well over ten years. As for the unicorn, well, as an elves-sighter reported, when interviewed by the Screech& Cod-Kissing Gazette, it was crushed last week by a berg in its death throes. They will all be sorely missed.

Do we live in an interesting country, or what?

Create an endangered species today – adopt a mascot. * * *July 2005

1 The last Beothuk died in 1819, just after the European newcomers killed her husband, and were ready to kiss and make up with her. I wish I werekidding.

THE ANNALS OF GOSHEN (Volume 1)

The Man Who Swamped for Paul

There were giants in the earth in those days. So begins many a tale, and sometimes, sometimes the tale is true.

So does Tom Brokaw(1) insist in The Greatest Generation, his book about American heroes. So do the eulogists for the late Ronald Reagan(2). So do the spin doctors for the early Brian Mulroney(3).

I, on the other hand, speak for the old-time lumberjack.

The other day I encountered one in the streets of Goshen. We’ll call him Joe. Joe grinned at me and bobbed his head, and I grinned at Joe and bobbed my head, and nary a word passed between us. We have been meeting like this for nigh onto fifty years. We grin and bob because we share a secret. We know for an absolute certainty that there were giants in the earth in those days.

Fifty years ago my father was strip boss at Camp 38(4) and I was an adolescent too young to be hired but I raced after him on his rounds in the bush. I would like to describe his stride as straddling three hills but then you’d think I’m exaggerating.

But here is no exaggeration. This is a meal I am describing: Bacon and ham and sausages and eggs and toast and butter and coffee and white sugar and cream and potatoes and pancakes and syrup and oatmeal and brownsugar and milk and jam and jelly and marmalade and peanut butter and optional cake and pie. This meal started the day. There were five moremeals in the day – I characterize the snacks as meals because each could impart several thousand calories.

The shortest man at the table could inhale enough in ten minutes to makea three-hundred-pound gourmand sob with envy. Now, Joe was a short man. Joe needed all the calories he could absorb in a working day. For Joe swung an axe as he notched an acre of trees. Joe swamped for Paul. Andall through the brush Joe and his bucksaw left a crooked trail of sawdustpiles. Joe would shoulder logs of which a single one weighed as much as an ordinary man. He bundled the longer ones and lashed them neatly with a chain so that his horse could drag them to the skidway where he levered them single-handedly up a jack to form a mathematically precise pile.

And Joe fought the elements. He fought off bears pilfering his lunch and blizzards filling his boots and mosquitoes so large – so LARGE – well, let Joe describe them, because I wasn’t there that one time:

Paul told me that two mosquitoes was trying to kill his prize heifer. They had the critter down and was trying to drag it off, he said, when along came a really big mosquito. The big mosquito simply killed off the other two, picked up the cow, and flew away.Yep, I knew those giants, those giants with names like Paul Bunyan and Brimstone Bill and Joe Mufferaw, though by that time they had all assumed aliases. They didn’t want to be associated with the future.

Even when I was a lad, the writing was in the snow, in yellow letters. Chain saws snarled through the woods. Machines killed off the horses. And mosquitoes shrank to their present puny size.

So when I meet Joe on the street I grin, and I bob my head, and I don’tsay a word, for what is there to say? The giants are all dead now, or if not dead, disguised as senior citizens.

But I notice little things. I notice that the store signs sway as Joe walks under them. That the sidewalk splinters where he places his boot. And that as he passes, the trees on the boulevard quake.

And my heart trembles.God bless the Joe’s in the earth these days. * * * July 2004

1 Thomas "Tom" Brokaw, American television journalist, acted as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004. 2 Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004) served as the 40th President of theUnited States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the RepublicanParty. 3 Brian Mulroney, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, served as Prime Minister of Canada from 1983 to 1993. 4 Kimberly-Clark, a forest products company, operated a number of remote dormitory bush camps in the Greenstone region.